Exhibition archive

In Glorious Glass Escher in The Palace showcased the finest optical glass from the Stichting Modern Glas collection, in collaboration with Kunstmuseum Den Haag. The glass sculptures from the Czech Republic and Slovakia magnify, reduce and colour everything around them, and literally give us a new perspective on the world.

Two artists, two disciplines, but a shared fondness for enigmatic architecture. In winter 2019/2020, Escher in The Palace brought together the work of artist M.C. Escher (1898 – 1972) and the sculptures of contemporary artist and architect David Umemoto (1975) for the first time.

The first exhibition ever to bring together M.C. Escher’s secondary school days with the prints that he was to make thirty years later. Escher’s former secondary school in Arnhem shows a considerable degree of correspondence between the real world and a series of post-war prints by Escher. It is generally assumed that after he left Italy in 1935 reality had very little bearing on Escher’s prints. People talk of his ‘mindscapes’, as opposed to the ‘landscapes’ that characterized his earlier work.

The art of graphic artist M.C. Escher is a source of inspiration to countless creative spirits—from architects to rock stars, from mathematicians to graphic designers and from schoolchildren to artists. Picture book creator Wouter van Reek draws inspiration from Escher too. His latest book, Nadir en Zenith in de Wereld van Escher (Nadir and Zenith in the world of Escher), takes readers on an adventure with its protagonists Nadir and Zenith. They end up in the wondrous world of Escher, replete with endless staircases and impossible buildings. That world was brought even more vividly to life in our 2019 summer exhibition.

Escher in The Palace showed a series of remarkable sculptures by the Dutch mathematician and artist Rinus Roelofs (Hengelo, 1954). The main subject of Rinus Roelofs’ art is his fascination about mathematics. To be more precise: his fascination about mathematical structures. Mathematical structures can be found all around us. We can see them everywhere in our daily lives.